lunes, 27 de julio de 2020

Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination

The Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination


By Father Julio Meinvielle

From Tres Pueblos Bíblicos en su Lucha por la Dominación del Mundo 

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope


Part II

The Antichrist

Before going on, we will explain here who is this mysterious personage which fills history, also in his own way, and whose grandiose triumphs should not be missing during the course of the ages.

What does faith teach us about the Antichrist? Saint John (I Letter, 2) tells us: "Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist cometh, even now there are become many Antichrists: whereby we know that it is the last hour." And Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Thessalonians (2, 2, 3-7) teaches: "Let no man deceive you by any means, for unless there come a revolt first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth, and is lifted up above all that is called God, or that is worshiped, so that he sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself as if he were God."

From the teaching of the Apostle Saint Paul, which is word of God for the Christians, it is clear that the Antichrist will be a singular, individual, person who, in himself, will distill the greatest wickedness that can be conceived. He will make war without mercy against God and against Christ.

His importance is so great for the destiny of men, that the Antichrist will have his precursors, the same way as Christ has had His. Saint Thomas summarizes (in Summa Theologiae, III, q. 8, a 8) what Catholic theologians hold most seriously in this respect: "The Antichrist is said to be the head of all the wicked, not by a likeness of influence, but by a likeness of perfection." Wherefore about that from the Apostle in II Tes. II, 2, the Gloss says "In the same way that in Christ resided the entire plenitude of divinity, so in the Antichrist resides in full the plenitude of wickedness, not because its humanity has been assumed by the devil in a unity of person, as in Christ was humanity assumed by the Son of God, but because the promptings of the devil influence his wickedness on him, in a more eminent degree than on all other men. And in this all the rest of the wicked who have preceded him are to a certain extent a figure of the Antichrist; in accordance with 2 Tes. 2, the mystery of iniquity is working already."

Because the devil — Saint Thomas explains somewhere else (Comment on Tes. 2, 2, 1.2) — as a proxy of whom the Antichrist will come, is beginning to work his iniquity in a concealed way, through tyrants and seducers, because the persecutions of the Church at this time are a figure of that last persecution against all good men, and are imperfect in comparison with the latter.

When will the Antichrist come? Only God knows the day and the hour, but Saint Paul teaches us what are the things that will precede him, and how shall the discession or apostasy of the nations, to which 1 Timothy 4 refers, be produced, and that the Lord himself mentions in Saint Matthew 24; and even before that, in turn, the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world (Matthew 24) and the entry of the nations into the Church should take place.

And, what is this discession? Is it simply the discession from the faith, the separation, or apostasy, from the faith? Saint Thomas picks up and completes Saint Augustine's opinion in a manner that acquires a stunning sense and reality. "This discession is also — he says (Commentary on Tess, Chapter 2, Lect 1) — the separation of the Roman Empire, to which the entire world was then subjected. Saint Augustine says in turn, that this is figured in Daniel 2, in the statue, in which the four kingdoms are named, and after them, the advent of Christ, and that this was a convenient sign because the Roman Empire was founded so that under its power the faith be preached throughout the world. But, how can this be, if nations have already separated from the Roman Empire, and the Antichrist has still not come? It must be said that it has not ceased to exist but it has turned from a temporal to spiritual empire, that is, of the Catholic faith of the Roman Church. It is a convenient sign that, just as Christ came when the Roman Empire dominated everyone, the sign of the Antichrist be, on the contrary, the separation from it"


The Devil, the Antichrist, and the Jews

It is evident that neither the evil nor the good are the patrimony of any people or of any man, but the Devil can have his predilections, as God and Christ have theirs. Let's not forget that the Devil is god inverted, so that he imitates God´s great things to ridicule them. Now then, the parallelism that can be established between the Devil, the Antichrist, and the Jews is surprising.

Of the Devil, Saint John tells us in Revelation (12. 9):"And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world." Of the Antichrist is said (2 Tess 2 9-11) "That wicked one whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders. And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe the lying."

Of the Jews, Christ himself says in Saint John 8: "You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth; because truth is not in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof. "

It is evident that, if a close intimacy for the perpetuation of evil in the world exists between the Devil, the Antichrist and the Jews, they should not be absent from the great task of undoing the work of God, which is the Holy Church. And so we see with what fury these three enemies of Christendom have been committed to the undertaking of destroying the admirable millenary civilization that Christianity edified. However, the blame for such destruction is not theirs, but of those Christians who were themselves unfaithful to the spirit of Christ. Because the same thing is valid to the peoples as it is to the souls: no one succumbs to the temptation if he does not want to. "God is faithful, — Saint Paul tells us (I Cor 10, 13) —  who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it." The declared enemies of the Christian man began to succeed in their criminal enterprise when the Christians began to weaken in the spirit of their interior life. Here we have, on the other hand, what history confirms of those shameful times, toward the end of the middle ages, in which the Catholic clergy forgot it should be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, with which the customs relaxed shamefully, and the faith was weakened in the people, while the temporary powers affirmed themselves in their pride for domination.


The subsequent destruction of Christendom

Christendom was nothing other than the ancient pagan peoples subjected, by means of the total subduing of their intelligence and will and their entire being, to the transforming domination of the evangelical law. The curable values of paganism, as were many, social, juridical, aesthetic, etc. elements, remained in the new structure but were baptized and sort of transformed in a new synthesis forged by the Church. Christendom succeeded, within the universality of charity which unites the most diverse peoples and races, to maintain, in perfect equilibrium, all the virtual qualities of man, both in his singular individual life and in his social projection. (See Epilogue of Concepción Católica de la Economía by Julio Meinvielle) Four are the essential formalities which constitute man in the fullness of his human perfection, in the current economy of salvation: The supernatural life of grace, entrusted to the Priestly Power; the natural life of the spirit, which has its concrete realization in virtue, virtus, which is also fortitude and vigor, and is entrusted to the political power; the animal life of the body, which is manifested by the necessity of satisfaction of economic needs with a certain abundance, and has its social expression in the burgher, the trader; and lastly, man's simple life, let´s say his purely vegetative life, with a rudimentary economy destined to satisfy the indispensable of human necessities, and which achieves its social expression in the artisan. In a proper ordering, without removing any value from any one of these formalities or social functions, even for the convenience of their own fullness, they should be hierarchically ordered, subjecting the more inferior ones to their corresponding superior ones. Such was indeed the admirable edifice of Christendom in the Medieval age, in which man labored and ate in order to live; lived to acquire the culture of his spirit in the practice of virtue, and practiced virtue to serve God; where peasants and artisans, united by bonds of well-affirmed family life and of the corporation, conspired to attain the best result of the economic life of the city, region and nation, submitting themselves to the virtuous authority of Political Power, and where this, in turn, subjected itself entirely to the power of the Roman Pontiff, who was the apex of all the admirable order which resulted from the unity in the multitude.

The Middle Ages are essentially theocentric, or theological, or sacerdotal, because all the human activities, each developing in its own sphere with an admirable economy, conspire to the union of man with God.

Three are the essential revolutions that destroy the edifice of Christendom: The religious revolution of Luther, which inaugurates a de-Christianized culture: "absolutist"  in that princes deny recognition of any rights other than their own will; "rationalist" in that man is sought in its own measures in all manifestations of art; "classic" because it seeks a rationalist perfection of equilibrium. The political revolution of 1789, with which a bourgeois world begins, animal, stupid and positivist: "animal" because the "homo naturalis" having been exhausted, only "homo animalis" can function. From here, the "stupid and positivist" materialism, because reasoning having been exhausted, that is, the faculty which interprets and unifies the events, nothing is left to man other than limiting himself to prove and see the facts, and collect them; in other words positivism. And the Communist revolution in the USSR, in which, after having his supernatural, natural and animal formalities been snatched from man, nothing but chaos can remain, the opprobrious slavery in which man, deprived of all his actual values, remains in the condition of a mechanical performer at the will of his master.

Protestantism, Liberalism, Communism: These are the three great and irreducible revolutions of a de-Christianized world; revolutions, all of them, dragged by the logic of an inflexible dialectical process; revolutions, also, which seeing things from another point of view, attending the efficient cause which directs them, are not but the concrete road to subject the Christian peoples to Jewish domination. (See Julio Meinvielle, El Judío)

But against this logic men can react, if they arm themselves with a strong will as is proper of men. And this reaction, when it is preferably translated to the economic-political plane is called fascism and can give rise to two life regimes entirely different: one of the two is pagan, and the other one Christian. The first one, which exalts the purely natural values of the nation, state, or race; the second one, which exalts all of the natural values, subjecting them to the law of grace; the first one, which seeks to re-ascend to the absolutist, naturalist rationalist stage, and the other one, that seeks to reascend to a frankly Christian culture.

From the decomposition of the Christian civilization emerge then three great peoples; a first one subjected to paganism, a second one subjected to Jewish domination, and a third one subjected to the Christian law. Three peoples that now find their concrete expression in constituted states: the pagan in the National Socialism of Germany, (See Julio Meinvielle Entre la Iglesia y el Reich), the Jewish one in Russia's communism, the Christian one in the regimes of Portugal or Austria, and in its fullest form, in the Christian state that should come out from the Spain that bleeds.

By way of observation, let's not cease to consider that there is no need for these new biblical peoples to coincide with the borders of any specific state; within the limits of a single state all three may coexist, and this is what happens today when, within the limits of a single town or state, pagans, Jews and Christians, that is, pagan nationalists, Communists, and Christians, clash against one another.

Let us likewise note that, in the preceding classification, we consider none but the pure forms, in order to facilitate a philosophical analysis. But intermediate currents and forces may exist; history is something in the making; it is always in fieri; so, for example there are states like France and England which are neither pagan nor Jewish nor Christian; neither liberal nor Communist; they present a state of transition between demo-liberalism and communism; you cannot tell in them what force shall predominate, whether the pagan, the Jewish or the Christian.

But it is evident that in a more or less short period of time, they will have to make up their mind for one of the three.

The current pagan peoples
The Germany of National Socialism constitutes the first typical case of a pagan nation. Let us see if the essential characteristics we have assigned to paganism are met in her.

First characteristic of paganism: recognition of God. Paganism is not atheist, it recognizes God and trusts His providence. And this is the case of Hitlerism, whose conception of life, its Weltanschauung is and wants to be profoundly religious. You will hardly find a speech by Hitler or of any of the great leaders of the Reich or of the National Socialist Party, in which God and His Divine Providence are not invoked. Precisely, one of the greatest and most felicitous tasks of National Socialism is its tremendous struggle against those without God, undertaken from the first day they attained power.

Second characteristic of paganism: idolatry. Pagans recognize God but they de-naturalize the cult: what corresponds to incorruptible God, they tribute to corruptible simulations. And thus, National Socialism, as such, professes a "positive" Christianity which is nothing more than the idolatry of the blood and of the Nordic race, venerated with forms, dogmas, and rites, sacrilegiously parodied from the Christian cult. The Holy Father, in his Encyclical to the German Church, denounces energetically this adulteration of sacred notions and terms, which had been denounced in grave and repeated occasions by the German episcopate. (Collective letter of the German episcopate of June 1934)

Third characteristic of paganism: Divinization of power. In all pagan nations which have achieved a great civilization, power is divinized. Not only in Rome but also in the ancient Assyrian and Egyptian nations. Stateolatry is something typically pagan. It is not easy to explain how it is fulfilled strictly in National Socialist Germany, where both the State and the Reich are divinized. A state that can dispose of everything is a divinized power. And in Germany, the State takes away the most sacred rights of the human person, as is the practice of religion; the right to constitute a marriage; the right to life, by the sterilization law and by the practice of euthanasia against innocent members of the community; the right of parents to educate their children, by the total education of the youth in the National Socialist molds. The state becomes a devouring Moloch which does nothing but immolate individuals to its own profit. It is a god.

Fourth characteristic of paganism: A national religion. And in Germany, the entire fight against the religious confessions, both the protestant and the Catholic, is carried out precisely because these confessions are considered to be contrary to the genius of the Germanic race; but, in contrast, the positive Christianity which Rosenberg has forged in The Myth of the Twentieth Century is propitiated and brutally attempted to be implemented, because this is to excite the living forces of the Nordic race.

Fifth characteristic of paganism: Exaltation of the individual's instincts, and hatred of the foreigner. In the recent study 'Entre la Iglesia y el Reich', it clearly appears how the National Socialist Germany has been forging itself by the hatred of everything not German and the glorification of the German grandeur, whose mission in history is to find itself; to be saved and to save humankind. Pangermanism, which with so much noise Fichte inaugurated, is itself the nucleus of Hitlerism and of its triumphs. Whence the great task of purging the German race, even in its biological reality by the adoption of the most modern scientific procedures and by the practice of sports. German flesh, with all its instincts of pride, also has to be divinized. Germanic Eugenics has this sense along with the strong education given in youth camps. This would not be reprehensible if it were a medium and not an end.

The words of His Holiness Pius XI (Mit brennender Sorge) have an extraordinary significance: "Many speak to you of gymnastics and sport which, used in their proper measure, provide physical gallantry, and does not cease to be beneficial to youth, but such great importance is often assigned to physical exercises that does not take into account the integral and harmonic formation of the body and the spirit, nor the appropriate care of family life, nor the commandment to sanctify the day of the Lord.... That the care to strengthen your body make you not forget your immortal soul, that you do not let it be dominated by evil, but defeat evil with goodness. (Rom. 12, 21) and, lastly, propose yourselves as the noblest goal, that of conquering victory in the state of eternal life (I Corinths 9, 24 and subs)

I believe it is not possible to demonstrate with greater amount of evidence, by the assigned characteristics, that the life regimen imposed obligatorily by the  government of the Reich on the German people is typically pagan.


The current Judaic Peoples

It would be entirely erroneous to imagine that what we call here Judaic peoples are peoples that have adopted Israel's politico-religious system. The Jews, who believe themselves to be a privileged and exceptional race, will never consent in the despicable goyim get to know what is reserved only to them, elected peoples. Judaic peoples are then those which have fallen under the domination of the Jews. Therefore, I assigned two characteristics to the Jewish people: their anti-Christianity and their messianic sentiment of universal domination. It is a theological people that knowingly and in conscience acts wickedly to destroy the work of Christ and enthrone the Antichrist. Let us recall the parallelism that can be established between the Devil, the Antichrist, and the Jews, according to the facts in Sacred Revelation. Saint Thomas picks up y his Commentary to Saint Paul's 2 Tess, the opinion of those who say that the Antichrist will come from the Jewish tribe of Dan, and will be enthroned by the Jews in the re-edified Temple of Jerusalem, so that the word of the Prophet Daniel be fulfilled; 9: and the abomination of desolation will be in the Temple; and Saint Matthew (24) "When you see the abomination of the desolation in the Holy Place, which was announced by Daniel, he who reads understand..."

What is curious is to prove that communism as such has been denounced by the Catholic Bishops and by the Roman Pontiff manifests a close relationship with the Devil, with the Antichrist, and with the Jews.

This is what we have been seeing, says the Roman Pontiff in Divini Redemptoris. "For the first time in history, we witness a coldly planned and carefully prepared battle of man against everything divine." (2, Tess, 11,4). In other words, he characterizes it with the same words that the Apostle characterizes the Antichrist. Therefore this is the people of the Antichrist. And so indeed, the German bishops, in the admirable Collective Letter (24. 12. 26), call it precursor of the Antichrist. The Holy Father somewhere calls it a satanic scourge ... and in the Speech to the Spanish refugees, he underlines the satanic preparation... It could be said that a satanic preparation has lighted this flame of hatred even more vividly in the neighboring shores as well as the fiercest persecution, reserved, by confession of her enemies themselves, against the Catholic Church and the Catholic Religion, because these are the only true obstacles to the unchaining of these forces, which have already made their trial and shown their measure in the rehearsal of demolition of all kinds of order, from Russia to China, from Mexico to South America"... In Divini Redemptoris he speaks again of the "truly diabolic propaganda the equal of which has perhaps never been seen in the world."

Previously already, in Cantate Christi he had said: "But facing this satanic hatred against religion, which reminds us of the mystery of iniquity of which Saint Paul speaks" (2, Tess, 2, 7). In which as can be seen, the Holy Father compares it with the Devil and with the Antichrist.

These characteristics suffice for us to recognize, without further effort, the Jewish trace in communism, but there is more. To it alludes clearly the Roman Pontiff when in Divini Redemptoris he says: "A third and powerful aid in the diffusion of communism lies in the real conspiracy of silence of a great portion of the non-catholic press all around the world. We say conspiracy, because in no other way can it be explained that the press, so eager to assign relevance to insignificant daily incidents, could for such long time remain silent about the horrors committed in Russia, in Mexico, and in a great portion of Spain, and talk so little about the vast universal organization known as communism operating from Moscow. This silence is due in part to shortsighted political reasons and is favored by various forces which have been determined to demolish the Christian social order since time ago," What can be such force, and who can be the ones that maintain this universal conspiracy of silence other than that also universal force which, for the gold, holds in its hands the press in all countries of the world? (See Julio Meinvielle, El Judío)

That from Moscow the satanization of nations through communism is directed, there can be no doubt, and that in Moscow it is the Jews those who rule and direct this campaign, there is also no room for doubt. The speech delivered by Alfred Rosenberg before the National Socialist congress in Nuremberg in year 1937 is a documentary piece of extraordinary value. In the impossibility of making a documentary demonstration, I direct readers to it here. At the end, so great is the opposition between the Church and Bolshevism that the latter, which is a sort of Contra-Christianity an Anti-Christianity, cannot be the work of other but that people who had made the Redeemer be hung on the cross, seeks nothing but to destroy His divine image on individuals and nations. Primary and principal work of the Jews, but not work of them only. because we cannot forget the Pharisaical tactic of plotting the death of our Savior under the shades, which they then had it executed by the pagans, since it remains, as if consecrated, for all their activity in the rest of the coming generations. In such wise, communism, as all aberrations and heresies which have appeared in Christian history, has been prepared by these children of darkness, which was then taken to practice by the naive hands of the pagans. The letter of the German Bishops establishes this fundamental opposition between the Church and Bolshevism in an admirable way.

In these times, in the name of the Catholic Church, bishops of different nations have raised their voice in chorus, if we may put it that way, to raise the conscience of the world to oppose Bolshevism and reject this first champion, this precursor of the Antichrist. The opposition between the day and the night, between fire and water cannot be greater than the opposition the Catholic Church and the general conceptions of Bolshevism Here, in the Catholic Church, the faith in a personal God whose name we consider sacred and whose commandments we are bound to observe. There, in Bolshevism, the rebellion against God, and the despising of His commandments. Here, the faith in the Word of God, the respect for the Holy Scriptures of the New and the Old Testament. There the biblical narratives presented as tales or myths delivered in Moscow's Museum to the mock of the visitors. Here, in the Catholic Church, the faith in Jesus Christ, Savior and Redeemer of the world whose blood has rescued us, whose cross is to us a sign of our strength and our elevation.

There, in Bolshevism, the cross and other religious emblems are banished from public life and even violently snatched from private homes. Here, the Church is the kingdom of God on earth, founded by our savior, to which a divine mission in the world has been entrusted; independent from the State in what concerns religious and moral matters; she was in the history of civilization, the greatest benefactor of humankind. There, separation of the Church from the State, servitude of the Church instead of her right to liberty; methodical battle for the annihilation of the priesthood and anything that presents an ecclesiastical character. Here in the Catholic Church, a liturgy which, associated with the art used to decorate the buildings devoted to divine cult, awakens in man a sentiment of a higher world in the celebration of the divine mysteries. There, in Bolshevism, closure or destruction of the Houses of the Lord and proscription of all religious feasts, Here, respect to authority and consecration of the family by monogamy. the indissolubility of matrimony and conjugal fidelity. There, a perpetual rebellion against authority, the destruction of family life, the despising of conjugal love and of fidelity between spouses, the lamentable situation of children deprived of any home. Here, in the Church, respect and guaranty of private property, as well as all of the rest of social life´s foundations, the development of a state of civilization which is the immortal glory of Christian peoples. There, in Bolshevism, expropriation of personal property in favor of the Communist State, the annihilation of all civilization, the triumph of barbarism, economic misery. In fact, the contrast between day and night, between water and fire, cannot be greater than the contrast between the Church and the Bolshevist organization."

The current Christian Peoples
Then, the two types of peoples, the pagan and the Judaic, emerge clearly now: Also with crystal clarity emerge the type of Christian nations. Austria and Portugal offer the type of these, but they will truly come out from the Spain that bleeds. The reason is the following: To forge a regime of a Judaic or a pagan type, only human forces suffice... Men do not need to elevate themselves, they don't need to overcome their own instincts. In contrast, a civilization of a Christian type is not the work of men but of God's grace. True, to that end, peoples do not need other than humbly submit themselves to the saving influence of the Church of Jesus Christ, which with her divine precepts, with her sanctifying sacraments, regulates all of man's activity in all aspects of his existence, is the way that the Christian peoples become forged. The marvelous middle ages, with its Gregorian chant, with its popular poetry, with its symbolic cathedrals, with the Summa Theologiae, with the prudence of the saintly kings, emerged that way... by a slow and reliable infiltration of Christian life in all layers of human activity. But the peoples were docile. Besides, after three centuries of the land being made fertile with the blood of martyrs, and of the environment being saturated with the science of the Christian doctors, a Christian world would well arise.

The grace of God is always ready to be poured on the world... but it is necessary that it fall on propitious soil. And this means souls who have freed of themselves, who have stripped off their own pride. It is yet to be seen what this means after humanism, in which man, during four centuries, has not been able to do but this: seeking himself in all manifestations of life and for that, for his own glorification, has been able to order all of the springs of human activity in religion, philosophy, economics, art, etc.

A Christian world, which can now arise at any moment, once the metaphysical possibilities of the terrible de-Christianization process have been exhausted, requires a certain preceding condition to happen: the martyrdom of fire and blood through which Spain so gloriously has gone through and is still going through. Let's not forget that a Christian civilization is heroic, not only in the heroism of the great epic achievements, but in that of the Christian life continuously lived, hour after hour, with a terrible fidelity to grace. And Spanish heroism, which has never been displayed with such an abundance, maybe not even in the crusade against the Crescent Moon, has that sense of prelude of an also great Christian life.. It is not possible to imagine that a nation that has seen itself crushed as a grape under the wine-press by the Communist brutality that has threatened to forcibly take away its land, its honor, and its religion, and who has known how to fight with valor, so as not to succumb, trusting in Jesus Christ and in His Mother, should come out of this bloody purification without doing something great, or betraying its own principles.

On the other hand, from the air that can be breathed in the reconquered Spain, by the spirit of the Requetés, from the great piety of the Spanish woman, from the declarations of bishops in public documents, from the declarations of the current leaders of the National Spain, everything leads to seriously affirm that from Spain a Christian State will emerge.

A Christian State which, after having ensured the legitimate rights that all Spaniards have to human well being, for an equitable regulation of economic activity in a corporative economy impregnated by social justice and Christian charity, will strengthen family life, regional life, national life, to affirm the unity of Spain under a prestigious chief, in the continuity of the Carlist monarchy, a Christian State which, after founding everything on justice and Christian charity that will penetrate all environments and social classes, will not believe that everything has been done, but will crown its work with the public and solemn recognition of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. In Spain, as it has been announced, the Heart of Christ will reign, and not by the simple officialist enthronization, but because the souls of all Spaniards, taken individually and collectively (there will be its exceptions as with everything human, but they will be just that, exceptions), it will yield to the grace of Jesus Christ. It will not surprise us that many a noisy public enemy of Jesus Christ, even of the sad Republican Spain, will return in sincerity and joy to work for the grandeur of Catholic Spain.

Not only will it be Spain the nation that establishes a Christian state. Other nations will follow her, because the forces of authentic Christianity which have been developing in the world since the anti-Christian time of the French Revolution, should have to achieve the plenitude of fulfillment in just as authentic Christian states. The future, and not too remote, will say how much is true of this assessment.

We have set out the characteristics of the three biblical peoples which in a visible form have been forging in today's world. Three forces, then, agitate in an irreducible and primordial way the profundity of today's humankind: Christianity, with its immemorial preoccupation for conquering the world for the spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ; paganism to keep the world for itself, for its own race or its own blood; Judaism who wants to conquer for the satanic enthronization of the Antichrist. These three forces are irreconcilable. What can there be in common between Christ and the Antichrist? What between Christ or the Antichrist and the satisfaction proper of paganism?

However, if the three forces are examined, the conclusion is reached that fully and entirely irreducible are not but two, namely Christ and the Antichrist, Catholicism, and Judaism. Paganism is an autonomous force, with its own sense, but which after all, is to work for Christ or the Antichrist. The final struggle of humankind will be waged by these forces only, just as the world began with the first fight of God against the devil, also the human history will close with these tremendous actors.

Then the human cycle can be closed because the end has reached the beginning. From God came out the world by the creation, to Him it has to return by the final judgment and the everlasting life. When the devil presented himself in paradise to man's perdition there were none other than they two: God and the serpent who wanted to take away from Him the first human couple. And on the last day of humankind, the devil, in the Antichrist, will make the supreme and last effort to take away from God the last remnant of the human generation. All the other intermediate forces, including paganism, will have disappeared, to leave on the scene no other than Christ and the Antichrist disputing the possession of man. 

Now, we are not yet in the supreme struggle of humankind. This, which becomes quite clear by the consideration of the current state of the world, in which great and solid forces are still debating, which cannot easily reduce themselves either to Christ or to the Antichrist, it becomes clearer even in the light of Catholic Theology, which enumerates what are the transcendental events through which we have to pass for us to reach that Supreme and definitive battle for the conquest of the peoples, the Antichrist will not come until the apostasy of the nations, about which different passages of the New Testament speak (Saint Paul, 2, Tess, 20,2,2), takes place.

But on the other hand, this apostasy of the nations is also not possible until the plenitude of the gentiles, plenitudo gentium, the entry of the nations into the bosom of the Church: "The full extension of the world will be converted to the Lord; the families of all the people will prostrate in obedience" (Ps 21, 28). "All the ends of the earth shall remember, and shall be converted to the Lord: And all the kindreds of the Gentiles shall adore in his sight.  And they will rule from one sea to the other and from the river to the end of the world ... all kings on earth will adore him, all nations will render homage to Him," (Ps. 71, 8, 11)

Let's see in its entirety the passage of the Apostle, in which he pre-announces the entry of the plenitude of the peoples. "I do not want you, brethren, to ignore this mystery (so that you do not have presumptuous feelings of yourselves) it is that a part of Israel has fallen into blindness until the plenitude of nations has entered, then the whole of Israel  will be saved" (Rom 11, 25)

Saint Thomas, in commenting this passage in Rom. 9, 25 says; "Until the fullness of the nations enter the faith, that is, not only some, particularly of the Gentile peoples, as were being converted then, but when the totality or in the most part the Church among all of the Gentile peoples, is of the Lord the land and everything that's in it."

As it is easy to verify, we are not yet in this fullness of nations, but if this current struggle of the Biblical peoples is not the final one, the final one may be not too far away. The biblical people of the Antichrist has already been installed in the world. As I have demonstrated earlier with the parallelism of the devil, the Antichrist, the Jews and communism, the latter cannot be but the people of the Antichrist.

The Antichrist has already begun to form its people with the definitive structure that it is to have in the final battle. There is on the earth already a satanic people which reneges of God because He is God, and that adores the evil because it is evil. The people of the Antichrist is then already established, which without doubt can be defeated in a first battle but that will then emerge more powerful for the tremendous final battle, in which Christ and only Christ will unmake him with a breath of His mouth.

The words of Pontiff Pius X, in the encyclical E Supremi, would come to confirm this opinion that the Antichrist is not far away: "When all this is considered — he says —  there is good reason to fear, lest this great perversity may be as it were a foretaste, and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days; and that there may be already in the world the "Son of Perdition" of whom the Apostle speaks. Such, in truth, is the audacity and the wrath employed everywhere in persecuting religion, in combating the dogmas of the faith, in brazen effort to uproot and destroy all relations between man and the Divinity! While, on the other hand, and this according to the same apostle is the distinguishing mark of the Antichrist, man has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God, raising himself above all that is called God; in such wise that although he cannot utterly extinguish in himself all knowledge of God, he has contemned God's majesty and, as it were, made of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored. He sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God."

And in Encyclical Miserentíssimus Redemptor (8. 5. 28) Pius XI says even more clearly, after describing the Communist ravages. "These things in truth are so sad, that you might say that such events foreshadow and portend the "beginning of sorrows" (initia dolorum), that is to say, of those that shall be brought by the man of sin, "who is lifted up above all that is called God or is worshiped"

The thought cannot truly be avoided, that the times predicted by our Lord: "And as the iniquity will increase, the charity of many will cool down" seem to be very near.

The first great battle between the three biblical peoples but, even though this is not the final one. we are being part of a terrible fight of the biblical peoples.

The first great battle has begun to be fought in the world: it is the terrible battle against communism. With equal forcefulness fight Christians and pagans against it. Another great people, the Muslims are also against communism. This is the supreme danger of the present hour, and the Holy Father considers it a scourge so atrocious that in his Encyclical letter Caritati Christi, he exhorts all men who still admit the belief in God to unite themselves, even with great sacrifice, to save themselves and save humankind.

The battle is universal, the same in the East as in the West, but by a transcendental historical significance, it has been made concrete, as regards to arms, on the Iberian Peninsula: the heat of the battle is borne by the Christians, but with the help of pagans and Muslims. From this one, communism will be defeated and overpowered, but it will not be fully extirpated. The apostasy which has taken root on Christian soil is too extended to be easily extirpated. Even when defeated, it will remain in a latent state, ready to spring up as soon as it encounters the proper conditions. The bloody battle has begun in Spain, but it will not be reduced to Spain... other nations will be the theater of similar events.

In some nations, like Spain, communism will be defeated by Christians; in others, it will be defeated by pagans. But communism will be defeated. To suppose, for an instant, that communism will come out victorious from this first battle, would be tantamount to delivering humankind to Satan, from whose hands no longer would there be anyone capable of reconquering it. Would it already correspond to the hour of the universal judgment? and then, what would it be of the plenitude of the Gentiles in the Church? what of the families of all of the people, which would prostrate in obeisance? It would look as if the Roman Pontiff, in Divini Redemptoris, sees this so luminously, that for such reason he cannot conceive of any kind of collaboration with communism on any grounds whatsoever.

On the other hand, the triumph of communism, more or less general, and the end of the world, would be the same thing because, what other more atrocious, more dreadful and terrible thing can be expected than communism? If the only thing that could justify a sort of triumph of communism is the need for purification which humankind requires, the latter will be attained, and quite greatly, with the simple clash of the nations against this satanic scourge (Pius XI), without it being necessary to admit its victory, though ephemeral. Spain gives us clear proof of that.


The pagan exaltation

I have shown above how the world — and in the central nucleus of the world where the nations that visibly direct the course of the present historical events lie  — there are typically pagan nations that in no way can be identified as Christian or as Jews; neither with the Christian State nor with communism. Germany offers a clear example. It is a nation with the resolute will of constituting itself with an essentially Germanic or Nordic religious-cultural conception, as I have demonstrated in Entre la Iglesia y el Reich, entirely alien to Jews and Christians.

But National Socialism does not seem to be the only case in the world. Japan offers in the East a type of pagan empire, just as China gets close to the Communist type of empire. And in the Western nations the pagan movement finds its actualization in Action Française in France, in Austria's National Socialism, and in some initial manifestations of Falangism and, among ourselves, some nationalist nuclei seem to be dragged by a pagan mystic. Every regime in which the nation or the State put themselves above all and in which the latter monopolizes education and formation of the youth is a pagan regime. It is evident that, in their concrete actualization, these regimes have to adapt themselves to the living conditions of the country where they are applied, and consequently diminish or accentuate their pagan character. Italian Fascism gives us a clear example of this; there is no doubt that in it a pagan force of Stateolatry and totalitarianism is strongly curbed by the concrete circumstances of the Italian Catholic and pluralistic life in which it has to act. We have to recognize frankly that the origin of the Fascist dynamism is not Catholic but Machiavellian-Hegelian. But what makes it essentially redeemable is a that it is precisely a dynamism. A dynamism of political activity propelled by the common good of the Italian people. And so, it has been renouncing its origin ever more every day to better serve the real interests of Italy. It is also clear that these pagan-Christian regimes will always be oscillating between the two until they decidedly resolve to chose between one or the other. And tomorrow's history will tell us which way they have finally turned. Because they cannot go on this way for a long time, since all nations have to decide in a more or less short period of time, for one of these theological formulations in the Bible.

If communism were to be defeated in this first battle, what fate would hold for the other peoples, the pagan and the Christian? They also must face the same decisive battle that has already begun on the German soil.

Everything appears to indicate that the German might, supported by the other fascistic or semi-fascist powers, will undergo a progressive enhancement until it turns into the tremendous Nabuchodonossor of Europe. Russia and communism will be liquidated; the Communist leaning powers, such as France and England will also be liquidated; the immense British Empire will be quickly unmade, Europe will tremble before the fantastic German Empire, and the world will seem to be surrendered to a pagan empire.


The Christian triumph over paganism

This coming triumph of the pagan nations over communism which will import a tremendous pagan exaltation is also the last ditch desperate effort of paganism to affirm itself in the world before Christ's breath drive it away from the face of the earth. The cross will triumph over the swastika. Hitlerism, which will think it has done with the Church will not have done more than finish her enemies, namely Protestantism, democratic liberalism, and communism. Indeed, these are the three monsters that have been disturbing Christendom since centuries ago, also against which National Socialism furiously attacks. Unbeknownst to it, Hitlerism will work for the Church which at the end shall defeat it.

German might will subdue the nations to make them docile to hear the voice of the Holy Church which will resound powerfully all over the world, from one end to the other, after Hitlerism is subsumed by the supernatural force of Catholic Germany. In such way, Germany, without it being its intention, will fulfill its great calling, to which it was predestined when she was constituted as the secular arm of Christendom.

Because that calling which Germany failed to fulfill in Christendom, to custody the integrity of the same by repressing the anti-Christian forces, will have to fulfill it now, without merit or glory, as a mere executor of God's designs. And the pagan triumph will attain meaning because it will be the prelude of the Christian Triumph which will come behind it. And so will history once more converge towards Christ, who has to be known and glorified by all nations.


Restoration of Christendom.

It is not easy to foresee what path can the apostate peoples of Europe take to return to the bosom of the Church. Whether Germanic might, which will suffer a delirium of self-exaltation will simply be subsumed into Christendom by the Catholic forces in its own bosom, or a liberating Christian prince from France, Spain or Italy, which God can arouse when He pleases, will submit the terrible and fragile Titan.

Perhaps the nations will return to the Church in the inverse order of their defection. That is, the first one that left it be the last one to come back, and the last one be the first.

There is no doubt that at that time, an exceptional mission will apply to Spain and France. To Spain, the same one she is carrying out now: to be the unshakable bulwark against communism and paganism, the same way that at earlier times it was against the arrogance of the Crescent Moon. And to France, purified of her great crimes, carry the standard of Christian order to East and West. Maybe then can what Venerable Bartholomew Holzhauser wrote in the Seventeenth Century which is still kept printed in its Latin version in the Minerva Library in Rome (See Prophetic Voices by J.M. Curicque, 1873):

..."In the midst of this,  peace shall not have been definitely re-established, as nations everywhere will conspire in favor of the republic, and so terrible calamities will still be seen, the Church and her ministers will be made to pay tribute, princes will be overthrown, monarchs condemned to death and their vassals will be given over to anarchy. The Omnipotent will then intervene with an admirable strike that nobody in the world could ever imagine. And that powerful monarch which is to come on God's behalf will reduce the republic to nothing, will subdue all his enemies and will reign from East to West, full of zeal for the true Church of Christ, he will unite his efforts to those of the future pontiff for the conversion of the infidels and the heretics. "

"Under such Pontiff which God predestines for the world, it will be required that the kingdom of France and the other monarchies come finally to an agreement, after the bloody wars which will have ravaged them, and which under the direction of that great Pope they lend themselves to the conversion of the infidel, and that way all nations will come to adore the Lord their God. At the time of this triumph of the Catholic and Orthodox faith, a great number of saints and doctors will flourish; the nations will love justice and fairness, and peace will reign in the earth for the space of long years until the coming of the Son of Perdition..." "At that time all peoples and all nations will flock into one fold and will enter it through the single door of the faith. And in such wise, the prophecy will be fulfilled: 'And there shall be one fold and one shepherd.' Saint John says (10, 16) and also this other one: 'And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come.' (Matthew 24.. 14)."

Perhaps it is not so strange what a monk of the tenth century, picking up common traditions of the time (Adsonnis abbatis monasterii Dervensis, Liber de Antechristi, Patrologia Latina Cl page 129 S). " The Apostle says later that the Antichrist is not to come to the world if the apostasy will not come before, the discessio, this means if all kingdoms of the world do not first separate from the Roman Empire, to which they had been subjected. This time has not yet come because even when we see the kingdom of the Romans destroyed for the most part, as long as the kingdoms of the Francs, who hold the Roman Empire, still last, the dignity of the Roman Empire will not have perished, because it will be continued in its kings. Our doctors teach indeed that one of the kings of the Francs will have entirely under his power the Roman Empire, which will exist at the end of times, and he will be the greatest and the last of all kings, who after having ruled his kingdom finally, will come lastly to Jerusalem and will depose at the Mount of Olive his scepter and his crown. This will be the end and consummation of the empire of the Romans and of the Christians, and then the man of sin will reveal himself. Said king will devastate great islands and cities, he will destroy the temples of the idols, convoke all pagans to baptism and in all temples will erect the cross of Christ, and then the Jews will convert to the Lord. 'In those days shall Judah be saved, and Israel will live confidently' (Jer 23. 16)"

Under this hypothesis, the monarchy of the French, the legitimate one of the Capeto, would not but be interrupted, and would come back in history to renew the greatness of faith and justice of the time of Saint Louis.


Answer to two possible objections to this hypothesis.

Two major objections can be posed against this hypothesis. Here is the first: If this were so, the coming restoration would be nothing other than a return to the past, which aside from contradicting the principle of irreversibility of history, would not explain the why and wherefore of four centuries of modern life.

Admitting the principle of irreversibility of history we must answer that this would not be the restoration of everything of the past, but only of the eternal spirit, which was respected in the great centuries of the middle ages; as well as of human institutions, such as the monarchy, even when it could be ephemeral, it conserves, as actualized in it, in the present economy of man, many and primary values of spiritual civilization. This spirit and these institutions would not not be restored as archaic things but by virtue of those eternal principles which do not belong to the past nor to the present but are rather valid for all times.

Every nation is a nation in time and space. To break in it a dynastic succession, even when, in the abstract, it may appear to be indifferent, is like breaking something in its life.

There is no need to note that the old, which would be restored not for what it has of old but for what it has of eternal, is valid for all times, it would achieve its existence in new conditions of life, in conformity with all the legitimate progress attained by the labor of generations. And that every positive acquisition operating in the times of modern deterioration will achieve greater splendor when it becomes integrated into the salutary principles of human order.

What could be the reason of being of four centuries of modern life? Quite simple. What should the task have been of the European peoples who received the benefits of the faith? Why, in God's inscrutable design, were these peoples the first that were favored with the Christian faith? Without doubt, for them to be the bearers of His word around the entire world. Europe was to give gratuitously to the world what it received gratuitously. What was done instead? She departed from the ways of the Lord and gave itself, body and soul, to discover the forces which the Lord had hidden in the profundity of the earth. And be it any the kind of relationship which may exist between either series of phenomena, the fact is that as she was separating itself from the faith, she was progressing in the discovery of the immense secrets the Lord had concealed in the recondite of beings.

Now then, God ordered all this providentially. Because what the Christian nations of Europe have not complied with on their own meritoriously, they will have to comply with in some other way and without merit, but they will have to comply with it. And so, the nations, on promoting technical progress and taking it all around the world, making distances shorter have done nothing but prepare the instruments so that in some not far off day, when the Lord so orders, having the nations been purified by means of salutary chastisements, tamed and made docile to listen to the word of God, can this be allowed to be heard, in an instant, throughout the world.

The terrible deadly instruments which in their senseless pride they themselves have invented will serve to purify them and call them to contrition in their hearts, what they have not willed to make in any other way, and the other powerful inventions which have changed the conditions of all elements, be it the air, the fire, the earth or the water, will serve to evangelize the nations in a few years. What in other circumstances would have been achieved over many centuries will become possible to achieve in a short number of years.

And in that manner, all things — in heaven and earth — shall sing praises to the greatness of the Lord, who knows how to profit from the ways of men to edify His own way. Who is able to imagine what can, in a near tomorrow, be the prodigious machinery of modern technology in the hand of Christian princes who have no other preoccupation but the spreading of the Gospel?

The second objection that can be formulated against said hypothesis is this: We see a regrettable apostasy of the masses. The poor, the humble, who constitute a favorite segment for our Savior, are progressively distancing from the faith and joining the Marxist ranks of those without God. How will this 'great scandal', denounced by Pius XI and recalled in Divini Redemptoris, be resolved? Everything that can be done in this direction, as everything that has been done since Ketteler, even when it may not yet have shown any visible fruits in a Christian economic structure, is not labor lost. This seed that has been sowed will give fruit in abundance at its proper time.

But perhaps the concrete path through which God may take the regrettably proletarianized laborers, back to the fold they have abandoned, is some other. A triple and almost simultaneous action is to carry out this task, the same that will re-Christianize the rest of the men of any social condition because all have been equally de-Christianized. The purifying fire of tremendous chastisements which will let itself be felt everywhere, like those which today are cast over Spain. Unfortunately, man is so far removed from God and has made himself so insensible to His voice, that only by means of jolts can he be awakened from the lethargy in which he is sunk. Be it not said that these terrorific presages may be a feverish excitation of the brain. Do not forget that in Caritate Christi of 1932, the Holy Father entreated the world to give itself to prayer and penance if it did not want to find itself immersed in a catastrophe of terror and anarchy. But as the world did not heed the anguished voice of the Vicar of Christ, these punishments have already started, and in what tremendous and disastrous forms in the black night of red Spain. When men have been prepared that way, they can usefully take advantage of the effusion of God's love which will inspire in the hearts of men of all social conditions, the enlightened word of priests and of saintly laymen which the Lord will arouse on the earth; men of an extraordinary sanctity as has not been seen in the Church for centuries, as has been announced by blessed Grignon de Montfort, in his admirable Treaty on the True Devotion of the Virgin.
  
This sanctity of the priests and laymen collaborating with the hierarchy, will sanctify the souls and the institutions and will give us a new Christendom. And in what abundance will it not give them the soil of the nations such as Spain, which have been watered with the blood of martyrs and heroes. they will forge the new Spain which will emulate the Christian epics of times gone by, just as it has now emulated the greatest achievements of legendary centuries. This is what should not be forgotten by those who think that a Christian state can only arise by means of the tyrannical sword of a powerful prince. The sword cannot give what is only the effect of God's grace. But the sword of the Christian prince will also be necessary to repress the perversity of those heathen who not only refuse to convert to their God but that by all kinds of seditious and deceiving actions seek to pervert the people. Corrupting liberalism will be entirely excluded from the nations and these shall submit their public life to the saintly laws of Jesus Christ and His Church.

The purifying fire will then prepare the ways of the Lord, the apostolate of sanctity will evangelize deeply the hearts, and the sword of the Christian princes will maintain the integrity of the Christian public environment. And the men of all conditions and the peoples of all races and nations will know the Lord their Savior.

And that way, the new Christendom will not be entirely new, as philosophers have tried to pretend, but instead will be the old one renovated, restored. The priesthood and the power of the princes will work together in this restoration of the rights of God and of the nations. Men, whatever the condition it may be their lot to occupy in the social scale, will have learned to appreciate above all contingencies of what is human, the highest dignity of the human person, which not in vain has been mercifully rescued by the Blood of Christ, so that for It and in Him, they may all learn to love themselves as brethren.

The letter of the Holy Father, addressed to the Mexican episcopate of March 28, 1937, seems to have been written with the sweet confidence of the near return to this prosperity of the Church in the world, the Roman Pontiff hardly complained about the tyrannical restrictions to which the action of the Church in that great nation has been forced, but instead, in it he expounds indicating the norms that the apostolate of the priests and of Catholic Action should follow to renew the exhortation to unity, to charity and to peace of all Mexican sons, in the apostolic work of Catholic Action, called to return Christ to Mexico, and to restore peace and even temporal prosperity.


The Muslim peoples in the Church

The Muslims will also enter the Church. A prodigious movement now agitates the Muslim world. This intermediate people between the Jews and the pagans has had as its historic mission to be the means of communication between East and West, between paganism and Christianity. A bellicose people, we do not know what providential lot can fit it in these decisive battles waged between the biblical peoples. But it is curious to note that while a powerful resurgence impulse agitates it in the inside, we see it get close to Christian powers such as Spain. Who knows if this is not the path for it to introduce itself definitively in the bosom of the Church.


The Communist triumph and the final triumph of Christ

After this felicitous Christian restoration of nations, which shall be the fullness of the gentiles of which the Apostle speaks (Rom. 11, 25) and which shall be crowned with what the Apostle himself calls the fullness of Israel, the peoples shall be distancing themselves from Christ, and communism shall show its head terribly again.

Jews will have been converting in great numbers in many regions of the earth where they are disseminated, but others will remain in a central Judaic nucleus, getting reduced in size and becoming more satanical. And so, the last residues of Israel will strongly dominate the nations and prepare themselves for the enthronization of their Messiah, who will probably be enthroned in Jerusalem. "And then that wicked one shall be revealed whom the Lord Jesus shall kill with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming, him whose coming is according to the working of Satan, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders, And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity".(2 Tess 2, 8-11)

What will come then, and afterward, only God knows, just as only He knows when that will happen.

But then, after the tribulation of those days (which shall be shortened for the love of those chosen [Matthew 24. 22]), the sun will darken, the moon will not light and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the virtues of the heaven will tremble: then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven, at which sight all men on earth will break out in tears and will see the Son of man coming  over the clouds in the sky with great power and majesty (Matt 24 29-30)

"And the Son of Man will come in the glory of the Father with his angels and give to each one according to his works" (Matt 16. 28). The harvest is the end of the world and the reapers are the angels. And just as the tares are collected and set on fire, it will be that way at the end of the world: "The Son of Man will send his angels and they shall gather out of his kingdom all scandals, and them that work iniquity. and will cast them in the furnace of fire. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the just shine as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father." (Matt 13 37-43)

lunes, 13 de julio de 2020

Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination

The Three Biblical Peoples in their Struggle for World Domination


By Father Julio Meinvielle


From Tres Pueblos Bíblicos en su Lucha por la Dominación del Mundo 

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope


Part I

Notes for a philosophy of history

God has spoken to man. And His word is kept intact under the indefectible custody of the Sacred Bible by the Holy Roman Church. The mind of God is thus open to man. And even though it is not open but only to enlighten him in the way to his eternal salvation, illumining him on the substance of Faith and Morals which he needs to know to attain his ultimate end, there is no doubt that indirectly and as if by a superabundance, He illumines man in the dark paths of history and in the course of human events. Theology is a positive aid for man, because, out of innumerable equally possible hypotheses, according to which history might have developed, it manifests the one that the most free Will of the Almighty has willed to choose. So, for example, man knows by Sacred Revelation that, after Christ, the world has entered its last hour (Saint John's Epistle 2, 18), so that we should no longer have to await any salvation economy other than in the Church founded by Christ and the apostles, and that the Church should last until the end of times. The Christian philosopher who may wish to scrutinize history knows this with certainty, that future history cannot be conceived without the action of the Holy Roman Church, who will exert her influence on the events with its hierarchy, its doctrine, and its sacraments. He will not then incur in the delirium of imagining a new era for the world in which Jesus Christ has been banished from the bosom of human history. The gates of hell will not prevail against her (Matthew XVI, 18) is a word that the historian should never forget if he does not wish to be wrong in his interpretation of historical phenomena.

This shows that if God speaks to us of three or four different peoples in Sacred Scripture, and speaks to us of them at all times, from Genesis through the Apocalypse, it is evident that these peoples must have a singular historical transcendence to explain the course that human events shall take. A Christian philosopher who has committed himself to finding a sense in those events cannot in any way neglect consideration of these peoples, under penalty of not going beyond the surface of the facts and of being wrong about their historical significance.

It is likewise evident that, if an epoch in history arrives in which humankind gets divided in a manifest way into these three or four peoples, and how a combat to death arises between them, this epoch must render a decisive historical significance and reach, this epoch must be an apocalyptic one because in it a biblical struggle is being waged, since it is no longer a political or economic struggle, like so many others that humankind has recorded, but it is a meta-political struggle, beyond the political order, even beyond the human order itself, since it gets to be waged between those formations which God has willed for the entire course of humankind.

Now then, our time presents in a manifest way a struggle between three or four biblical peoples, namely pagans, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. And a decisive struggle to death because these peoples fight, being conscious of the struggle and of the decisive character of the struggle for world domination.


Theology and history

That such an epoch should render a purely providential historical significance, is demonstrated precisely by the fact that the struggle is waged between these biblical peoples precisely in such their characters. History moves, and it does not move haphazardly as if it had no sense. Above all human contingencies, taking advantage of all the clashes between human groups, religious, political, economic, individual clashes, history gets weaved, and gets weaved not by chance, but as it is willed to be written by the inscrutable will of God, who knows how to right straight in men's crooked lines. And this straight writing of God cannot consist of anything other than that all things, even the most crooked ones of men, be directed softly but firmly toward the providential ends, which in part have been revealed to us by God in His infinite mercy. History is then God's mind written over time. Where men do not read, angels can read. History is an eternal struggle between the rights of God over His creatures and the pride of the creature over the rights of God, with the final triumph of the City of God. God's Mercy shall finally triumph, and themselves the revelry and blindness of man must cooperate toward this triumph. The words of Saint Thomas with respect to the allowing of evil in the providential order, provide much light about this "Being God the providential cause of all being, it is proper of His providence to allow certain defects in some particular things so that the perfect good of the universe be not prevented, there would be no life for the lion if there were no killing of animals, nor the patience of the martyrs if there were no persecution by tyrants." (sum. 1 q 22 a. 2)
                                                        
If historical events were analyzed isolatedly, without putting them together under a unique light projection, these events would have no meaning. And even distinct events which may acquire a certain political or economic meaning, for example, when they are examined under a purely political or economic light they will fail to yield their entire meaning if not viewed under a superior light, which in the ultimate instance cannot be other than the unsoundable divine will, manifested to man in Revelation. You may say that the latter can hardly shed light on history because this is not its primary and principal end. History is then left undecipherable to man. Only little can be envisaged, and as if from a great distance, under half-light, using the glimmer of theological light with which God has willed to illumine man in his way toward eternity.

But it is evident that these slight glimpses into the mind of God which theology provides us shed a light of quality, and therefore with an explanatory force greater than what can be provided by the statistics or comparisons of any other human science. Hence, the Christian philosopher who wishes to penetrate into the meaning of the historical events cannot do without the theological light offered to him by oral and written Revelation and the Church's directives in the regular government of Christendom by means of the Holy Father and of the bishops placed by God to rule it. He should not work exclusively with this light but he should work with it, his work shall be specifically philosophical. But he should be aided by the facts provided by theology, which is the science of God.

It is unnecessary to forewarn that the conclusions to be arrived by this means are exposed to the fallibility of all human science. Its greater or lesser certainty or probability shall depend, as in any human discourse, on the degree of solidity of the premises on which the conclusions are supported.

The present study will proceed within such a method. It will be a specifically philosophical study on the course of historical events, intending to glean their meaning, and for that purpose will take advantage of all the clues that may be provided by the Word of God contained in Sacred Scripture and in Tradition, and which can be deduced from the ordinary government of the Holy Church as manifested in the directives of the Roman Pontiff and of the bishops subordinated to him.

The main objective of this disquisition is to be constituted by the proximate or remote term toward which is heading the course of the current historical events, which so greatly unsettle humankind. Where are we heading? What will be the outcome of the war waged by the forces into which humankind is divided? What is the likely fate of communism? What that of fascism? And Christ's kingdom, how will it be working in the world? Is it possible, in what conditions, and when, will the restoration of Christendom take place? Problems these that anguish the intelligence of men and which are the object of a thorough study by a Christian philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his Integral Humanism. Even though no reference shall be made in the course of this exposition to the thinking of any philosopher, the conclusions at which it arrives are entirely new and unprecedented, as it will be easy to perceive by anyone who takes them into consideration.


The Biblical Peoples

Sacred scripture explains to us the origins of the peoples in Genesis when it refers to the story of Noah, saved from the deluge. Gen IX. :


They were then the sons of Noah who came out of the ark, Sem, Cham and Japheth: this same Cham is the father of Chanaan
Those three are the sons of Noah, and from these the entire human genre was propagated
And Noah, who was a farmer, began to till the land and planted a vine
And drinking of his wine, he became drunk, fell asleep, and laid naked in the midst of this tent Which being seen by Cham, father of Chanaan, that is, the shameful nakedness of his father, went out and told his brothers.
But Sem and Japheth, putting a cape over their shoulders and walking backwards, covered the nakedness of their father with their faces turned away .. and so did not see the disgrace of their father
When Noah woke up from his drunkenness later, having learned what his youngest son had done, said: 
Cursed be Chanaan, he shall become a slave of the slaves of his brothers, and added:Blessed be the Lord God of Sem, be Chanaan his slave.May God make Japheth great and dwell in the tents of Sem, and make Chanaan his slave.
This damnation of the sons of Cham explains sufficiently the suppression of the sons of Cham in history. Over the course of the centuries, they never exert any historical influence... they will be a people, but an inferior people, always in tow of other peoples.

And indeed, the African blacks, descendants of Cham, do not influence history. It is a cursed people. For the philosopher of history, they do not have to be taken into account, and sacred scripture explains why.

Only the descendants of Sem and of Japheth promise interest. Genesis relates that when they got engaged in building a tower and a city, the peak of which could reach the sky, the Lord descended to see the tower and the city being built by the sons of Adam. Gen:
Cast down, O Lord, and divide their tongues; for I have seen iniquity and contradiction in the city.
and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

The Scripture, which with these plain words refers to the dispersion of the peoples, does not refer to them anymore but only indirectly. The people followed their separate ways and created various civilizations. The descendants of the two brothers kept distinctive traits. The Arians and the Semites perpetuate themselves in their generations with inextinguishable characteristics. The Semites spread over Asia Minor and over the north of Africa whereas the Japhethists were spread through the islands in their lands (Gen 10.5), that is, the coasts of the Mediterranean in Europe and Asia Minor, from where they slowly advanced towards the north in all of Europe and occupied a considerable portion of Asia. Horace, in his Odes (1,I. Odes III, V. 27) evokes the lineage from Japheth when he mentions the Audax Japeti genus.

These peoples, which came out of the hands of God, began deviating from their paths, forgetting his law, and gave themselves to idolatry, In this way, they constituted the gentile or pagan peoples.


The Pagan Peoples


God did not create the peoples in paganism. His Divine Mercy, even after the fall, comforted man with the means necessary to achieve their eternal salvation. The law of nature, with which men ruled themselves in that first age of the world, was not called that way in opposition to the supernatural law since it also comprised the supernatural precepts of faith, hope, and charity, but in opposition to the external or written law. Because instead of being imposed externally, it was known, whether by the simple instinct of nature in what refers to precepts of a natural order, or whether by simple divine inspiration with respect of the precepts of a supernatural order. In such a state, Saint Thomas tells us (Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a J. ad. 3), men were not moved to adoring God because of any exterior law, but solely because of an interior instinct. And many were the just who made their life fit this law of nature, not only among the first patriarchs of humankind, but also after Abraham and Moses as, for instance, Job the Saint who, not being a Jew nor a proselyte, gave great and extraordinary proofs of sanctity, and possibly many are those who rule themselves by it nowadays and thus become saved. This can be thought particularly of the great holy men of Brahmanism in India, who in symbols and in very high theological-metaphysical principles, attain such an elevated knowledge of the things of God which could be thought today as being the exclusive patrimony of Christians. (See Johanns S.J. "Vers leChrist per la Vedanta").

Paganism is the infidelity of men to this law of nature. Saint Paul describes to us with definitive characters, the traits proper of all paganism. In his letter to the Romans, the apostle says, speaking of the pagans, I. 
because, having known a God, they did not glorify Him as a God, but instead, gotten arrogant, wandered in their discourses, and their nonsensical hearts became full of darkness; and while they boasted of being wise, ended up being foolish; and they changed into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things, the glory of the incorruptible God.
Let us deduce here the characters of paganism


First characteristic: the recognition of God.

Paganism is not atheistic. It recognizes God and trusts His Providence. And a one God, ruler of the world, distinct from the world itself. Saint Paul, in the quoted passage clearly insinuates this idea which has been scientifically confirmed by the modern researchers of religions. What is called henotheistic religions (adoration of one god without denying the existence of other deities) is nothing more than this. Henotheism, says philosopher Hartmann, has its foundation in the positive identity which is recognized in all deities of nature, an identity which permits honoring in the person of each god (mainly that which each of the deities admitted since the origins, the divinity in an absolute sense, the divine, God. And Tertullian recognized the henotheistic nature of the pagan cult when, speaking about the human soul, he said:
You confess the only God and Him alone you name when sometimes you speak to the gods you appear to confer to them a power they do not have. (De Testimonio animae, c. 2); 
and Saint Augustine when he writes: 
Even before believing in Christ, the pagans have been able to ignore entirely the name of him who is the God of the universe, because the prestige of the true divinity is such that it cannot remain entirely and plainly hidden from a reasonable creature, using his reason.


Second characteristic of paganism; idolatry.

Saint Thomas says (II,II, q 94, a, 1, ad. 4) that the name idolatry was given to "any cult given to creatures even when done without images". And since pagans did not have a clear idea of the transcendence of God, which is infinitely above all things created, as the necessary being above the contingent one, and at the same time of His divine immanence which is present in all beings and all activity of the creatures, as Being and as First Cause, (Saint Thomas III, q. 2 ans 8), they saw divinity in changeable things of creation, they fractioned it in these same corruptible things and in them they adored it.


Third characteristic of paganism: divinization of power.

Paganism, says Saint Paul, got to change the glory of the incorruptible God into the image and likeness of a corruptible man. It divinized everything and could not avoid assigning divine characteristics to Power, above all to political Power, which is the sum of conceivable powers on this earth. Paganism could not distinguish in the reason of all and of a part that fits all men. It is all because man, every man, even the most miserable and disgraceful, is ordered directly to God, his ultimate end. It is a part because to attain the plenitude of everything he has to submit himself as a part of different societies needed for his perfection. Man is all, he is a person, and in this sense, he cannot be fully subjected to any power on earth, on the contrary, the powers of the earth, and even the Church, have been made for man. Man is part and owes obedience to legitimate powers, the authority of which comes from God (Rom. XIII, 1-2). (see Julio Meinvielle, Concepción Católica de la Política.) Paganism necessarily had to make of Power, of the State, a God. It recognized the organic and hierarchical character of power, but so as to divinize it. Power would, for the same reason, inevitably turn out to be tyrannical, because it did not serve man but it served itself of man.


Fourth characteristic of paganism. National religion.

Paganism, not knowing either the transcendence of God, who is above all that has been created or the transcendence of man who, in an ultimate instance, is not ordered entirely to anything other than God, was incapable of perceiving the idea of a universal religion, one for all, the same way there is only one God, Creator, and End of men. Religion was particularized as the State and identified with it. The Caesar, monarch, consul, or tribune was likewise the one who regulated religious life when not being himself the object of cult.


Fifth characteristic of paganism: exaltation of own instincts and hatred of the foreign.

When God is ignored, man, made to the image and likeness of God. cannot be truly known. And so, paganism despised man. It despised man at the same time that it exalted him. This is because it exalted some and despised the rest. It exalted those of its own blood, nation or tribe, and it despised those of other blood, nations or tribes. It exalted him on glorifying his shameful instincts. Paul reproaches this of the pagans in his famous letter to the Romans.


Wherefore, God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness: to dishonor their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.
For this cause, God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women themselves have inverted the natural use into that use which is contrary nature.
And, in like manner, the men also, casting aside the natural use of women, have burned in their lusts, one towards another: men with men, working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.
And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient. Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness: full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity: whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute: without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death: and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.


The Jewish people

Such are the common characteristics applying to the pagan world in the various great civilizations they have created. Not only in the Greco-Roman but also in the very ancient Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. All these are idolatrous peoples, which on losing the knowledge of the true God, corrupted also the principles of order and health on which the city of man should be edified.

Great and colossal undertakings were planned and executed, of which a pale idea is given to us by the archaeological remains, but they diminished man, depriving him of his prerogatives of human dignity which constitute his true grandeur. Man was dehumanized to be converted into a useful thing, into a tool. On man losing God, he also lost himself.

For this reason, God set apart a people for Himself, in which the primitive revelation which God had communicated to humankind's first parents should be kept intact. Two thousand years before Christ, God calls Abraham and tells him: 
Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father's house, and come into the land which I shall shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and magnify thy name, and thou shalt be blessed. I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed.

To this people, God gives a written law, which does not save of itself by intrinsic efficacy, but which is a sign of Him in whom all lineages of the world should be blessed. This people get thus sanctified and consecrated to God, not for being such people nor for descending from father Abraham, but by the Christ, the Son of God, blessed over the ages; the Promised; the Liberator; the Redemptor, who was to come out from its bosom.

This people, which God protects in a special way, has indeed brought to us the Redeemer, the Redeemer's mother, and the apostles, first trunk of Christ's Church. The Jewish people have been in Christ, the vehicle for the great blessings of humankind.

But just as paganism is an infidelity to the law of nature, in the same way, Judaism is an infidelity to the written law. The great sin of the Jews consists of, by having adhered to the sign, to the figure, they have lost the substance of salvation, which is Christ.  As written by Saint John (Gospel I,11) in an eternal word: He came unto his own: and his own received him not.


The first distinctive character of the Jewish people after Christ came to the world is its anti-Christianity.

They hate Christ as a traitor who came out of their race. They hate him because they consider He has disappointed them; when He should have brought them the greatness to dominate all their enemies, the rest of the peoples, He has instead done nothing other than tie them to the dominating yoke of those other peoples.


The second distinctive character of the Jewish people is their ambition to dominate the world.

What Christ did not do is to be accomplished by their race. The Jewish people have a conscience of their eternal destiny through the history of humankind, they want that the promises made to them, and which they have always understood in a carnal sense, attain fulfillment. They have inverted messianism that way; to that which in the mind of God has had a spiritual sense, they have assigned a material significance and have labored with a conscience ingrained in the deepest of their race over the ages, in the midst of the most diverse peoples, certain that someday will come when, from Jerusalem, the center of the world, they will dominate all nations with a hard stick.

Jews, then, have the mission of being the dissolvers of the Christian peoples, with a clear conscience that whatever they may do to corrupt those peoples, separating them from Christ and from all traditional ties of life, is a preparatory task for their future domination. (See Julio Meinvielle, El Judío)


The Christian Peoples

The world is ordered to Christ. To Christ was ordered the law of nature which ruled the just in the first age of the world, and to Christ was also ordered the written law of the Jewish people, which clearly showed him in figure. And the law of Christ was realized perfectly in the new law which Christ himself, Redeemer of humankind, promulgated.

Law of nature, written or ancient law, and new law, are not essentially different laws. (I, II, p 106, a. 1). They can be distinguished; as the imperfect from the perfect; as infancy from adulthood; as the sprout from the plant and from the flower; as the sunset from the dawn and from midday. For this reason, in the city of God, one at the bottom, there are three divisions that correspond to the three moments of its progress and form three different worlds, the world of the first just, the Jewish world, and the Christian world.

In all three, Christ is known, in the first age of the world, very obscurely, mainly by the divination of the instinct and the interior movements of grace; in the second, undoubtedly by greater grace, but additionally by the symbols, the figures, the rites, and the promises; in the third one by the reality oh His presence. What we have heard, what we have seen with our own eyes, what we have contemplated and what our hands have touched of the Word of life, this is what we announce (I John, 1, 1) ( See Journet, Les Mondes, in La Vie Intellectuelle, March 1929)

In Christ, everything culminates. What Saint Paul teaches in his letter to the Colossans, I, and subsequent, has a universal value that will never be pondered enough. By Him all things were created in the heavens and in the earth; the visible and the invisible, whether they be thrones or denominations, whether principalities or powers, all things were created by Him and, in attention of Him, and thus, He has being before all things, and all subsist by Him. He is the head and the body of the Church, and the principle of resurrection, the first one to resurrect from among the dead so that He has the primacy; as it pleased the Father to place in Him the plenitude of all being, and to reconcile all things with Him by Him, re-establishing peace between heaven and earth by means of the blood He shed on the Cross.

All things converge toward Christ. And even the pagan peoples, which were unfaithful to the law of nature, as the Jewish people, who were so to the written law, have prepared the ways. Everything has been written in history so that His Kingdom, announced by the prophets, arise at the end of times over the summits of the hills and over mountain passes so that peoples run there and nations come in haste (Micheas IV, 2 and subsequent). Undoubtedly, it is not easy to make a fully documented historical verification of this when historiography has been maliciously perverted by a diabolical criticism; but history does not oppose it and clearly shows that this has been the way of Divine Providence. The Greeks have prepared the conceptual apparatus for the wisdom of the Church, so marvelously completed in the Summa Theologiae of the Angelic Doctor, and the Romans, their marvelous language as well as their colossal sense of the law and of organization, and the barbarians have contributed the live, virgin, mass for the evangelization and even for a Christian civil order, aside from other invaluable contributions, as the military ardor of the Germanic peoples which was employed in the conformation of the Holy Roman Empire.

The words of immortal Leo XIII in his encyclical De civitatum constitutione christiana contain a perennial truth: The immortal work of merciful God which is the Church, even though in itself and by its nature, looks to the eternal salvation of souls and to the happiness which is to be attained in heaven, yet even in the order of the perishable things it offers so great abundance, so many usefulnesses which it would not have been able to offer in such quantity and greatness if it had been instituted primarily and above all for the attaining of prosperity in the present life. Let us present the characteristics which should mark any civilization informed by the Christian principles; in other words, let us assign the characteristics of the Christian peoples.


First characteristic of Christianity. Adoration of the only God and of his envoy Jesus Christ.

Christianity has affirmed with the same energy the transcendence of the uncreated over all things created, and the divine immanence of God who is present in creatures by essence, potency, and presence. God, who is infinitely above man, does not step out of the way, but on the contrary, He strongly directs man to Him, even with a love reaching infinity, because, after man's prevarication, He has sent his Only-begotten son so that He would be the way the truth and the life. God has loved man so much that to raise him from the prostration in which he was sunk, He has not hesitated in taking his frail nature, suffer the punishments to which man had been made liable and rescue him for the eternal beatitude which is nothing less than the intuitive and fruitive possession of the Divine Essence. In Christianity, the Divine and the human are united, God and the world without, blending together. Idolatry is radically proscribed.


Second characteristic of Christianity: God lives in Christ and Christ lives in the Church.

The relations of man with God are not left to the discretion of the man who would get along with his God. Man cannot attain the union with God but through His envoy, Jesus Christ and, in turn, cannot communicate with Christ but through the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who is Jesus Christ realized in the social order. The Church is a spiritual society instituted by God himself, which proposes man the concrete way for salvation and provides the means left by Christ for the auspicious transit through that road. The Church with its divine dogmas is Teacher of the Truth, the Church with his divine precepts exercises a real guiding action on consciences, the Church is king; the Church, with its divine sacraments and means of sanctification, is Priest who saves. All the order of the souls in their way to salvation is in the hands of the Holy Church, which in turn is founded firmly and unshakably on the Roman Pontiff with the episcopate united to him.


Third characteristic of Christianity: Its universality.

Just as all other religions have been localized at a point in time and space, Christianity, the same as God, from whom it has its origin, has maintained itself the same and with the same sanctifying and civilizing force in the most diverse human complexes.


Fourth characteristic of Christianity: Its position before the political power of the peoples.

Christianity has as its mission to lead men to eternal life. All that in some manner falls under this end is within the orbit of its attributions. But what cannot be included in such end lies, for that same reason, outside of its orbit. Political power forms then a world irreductible to the authority of the Church. Therefore, every human person belongs to two cities, a terrestrial city, which has as its end the temporal common good, and a heavenly city. the end of which is eternal life.

Within the same walls and in the same human multitude there are two peoples, and these two peoples give origin to two distinct lives, to two principalities, to a double juridical order. (Maritain, Primauté du Spirituel; Julio Meinvielle, Concepción Católica de la Política,) But distinguishing does not mean separating. They are two distinct things but united. United hierarchically in the primacy of the eternal over the temporal; of the Church over the political society; of God over man.


Fifth characteristic of Christianity: Union of all men and all peoples by a law of charity.


Christianity distinguishes and unites. It affirms the sacred rights of every human person, it affirms the rights of the family, of the worker organizations, of the governmental powers, of the Church itself, of Christ, and of God, and unites all of them, without abdicating, but on the contrary, by the affirmation of these rights with the bonds of charity. Man, who comes from God, who has been rescued by Christ, who is sanctified by the Church, who has a sole destiny; to wit, possession of eternal life, has to be united with his fellow men because they are united with God. If someone says: Yes, I love God, and at the same time he abhors his brother, he is a liar. Since he who does not love his brother, whom he sees, how can he love God, whom he does not see? (John I, Letter IV, 20)


An intermediary biblical people of great historical importance: The Mohammedans


A word also on another biblical people of great historical, though secondary, importance: the Mohammedans. To no one is hidden the biblical origin of the Mohammedans, descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham by his slave Agar. If Isaac inherited the promises made by God to Abraham, that the Jews be a vehicle, and in Christ attained admirable fulfillment, the Mohammedans also received a blessing from God which is fulfilled through the ages. Gen XVII.


I have also made my request to Ishmael; lo and behold, I will give him my blessing and will give him a numerous descendancy; he will be the father of twelve commanders and I will make him chief of a great nation. 

Ishmael is neither Jew nor Christian nor pagan. He is not pagan because he comes from Abraham after he had left Ur to move to Chaldea; he is not Jew even though he comes from Abraham, he is excluded from the promises made to Abraham, and he is not Christian as it appears to be evident. Then, the people coming from him are neither one nor the other. Genesis foretells that his nation will be great and numerous, and insinuates that it will be an eminently bellicose nation, not only for having been called great but for having alluded to the twelve commandants.

And history witnesses that these words, which signify the intermediate character and the belligerent greatness that fit the Muslim people, have been fulfilled. Mohammedans have indeed been the intermediaries between the pagan culture, not only the Greco-Roman but also of the far East, and the Christian peoples, and who knows if they may not tomorrow, converted to the faith, be the ones who reduce the last gentile nations to Jesus Christ. The Mohammedans have been above all, under their condition of exterior enemies of Christendom, the ones who have maintained the heroic unity of the Christian peoples, contributing in that way to the splendor of their greatness.


Survival of the biblical peoples after Christ


If these four peoples are truly biblical; that is, if they appear in the Word of God contained in the Bible as directly expressed, it is evident that they should fulfill a theological mission in history. I say theological, meaning to signify that it is a mission willed by God with efficacious antecedent will, prior to history itself; that therefore governs history; whence these peoples are not those who will be dragged by the torrent of human contingencies to disappear if it fits so in the whirlwind of events, but on the contrary, the destiny which God has assigned to these peoples will drag the torrent of the contingent events until the admirable design of Divine Providence is fulfilled in history.

Be it not said that this endangers the human liberty to choose, as this liberty is not omnimodal as if in fact individuals or human groups would have to choose from among all hypotheses simply possible, but it is restricted to the hic et nunc possible only. The sphere of liberty is then conditioned by a number of factors which man cannot modify without it resulting in a deterioration of his psychological liberty. Can we, perchance, because we are free, evade the conditions of life, and live in a world — good or bad — which is not this of our modern life? And do we, perchance, because we cannot evade it, lose the psychological faculty to choose this or that at our own discretion?

On the other hand, history confirms the transcendental influence of these four biblical peoples. Everything is arranged in the course of human events to provide a background to the figure of Christ, who is the central event of humankind. I had made notice of this before, where I talked about the Jewish people and of the pagan people, which, in fidelity to the Divine Will, or in contradiction to His precepts, have not but prepared the paths to Jesus Christ, King of time and of eternity (Pius the XI, Mit brennender Sorge). After Christ, the same law governs the course of events. 
And in the last days, the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go, and say: Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths...(Isaiah II, 2) 
These words, which Theologians adduce to demonstrate the perpetual visibility of the Church of Christ, also demonstrate that this Church shall be the central focus of history. The Church has been placed in the midst of humankind, at the center of time and space, as a sign of contradiction, as a stumbling stone (Luke II, 34), as ruin and resurrection; no one, be it individuals or nations can remain indifferent before the Church, because they either hitch to her for their glory, or they do not for their ruin.

The luminous event that raises itself in the ages after the coming of Christ is the Church, with its head in Rome, in the midst of nations. Around her, Christendom is formed. Eight centuries of clashes of peoples against peoples, civilizations against civilizations, of pagans and Jews against Christians, has been the melting pot from which God's Spirit made the marvelous Christendom emerge. It will always be one of the culminating moments in history, that which Pope Leo III, at Christmas night of that year placed the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne and made the people acclaim him as the Roman emperor. "There was in the restoration of a title preserved as glorious, something which would seduce the imagination of the people of the Eternal City, and the Papacy appeared to realize itself by coming to be, by a grandiose initiative, the visible fount of an unprecedented dignity in the political world." (Godefroy Kurth, Les origines de la Civilisation moderne, volume two, sept. edit., p. 309).

The Church, Christ visible on earth, appeared with the plenitude of His spiritual royalty, from where, by superabundance, she also strengthened and affirmed the temporal power of princes, and these, in turn, being conscious of their mission of God's servants and servants of their subjects, offered the firmness of their strength for the kingship of God's rights over their subjects. Who could sing of those magnificent ages of profoundly Christian life, which penetrated the sectors of all human activity, elevating the souls up to divine effusions of authentic mysticism, which illumined the intelligences with a never-dreamed of vision of the inenarrable order of beings, of which Saint Thomas' Summa Theologiae is nothing but a pale reflection, who transfigured the aesthetic capacity of all domains of the arts, as revealed by the music, the poetry, the painting, and the architecture of the great middle ages in the insuperable works, the greatest of the human genius of all ages and latitudes, which transformed the customs of the people even to make a prayer out of the laborious fulfillment of duties, family, social and political, and all that while maintaining firmly the attention to the Spirit of God, without at any moment enervating the dispositions of the spirit. And, how can we forget the magnificent medieval knights, theologians, philosophers, poets, and warriors at the same time, because the force of Divine grace elevated together all the infinite abilities of which men with the grace of God are capable? The Christian people have given proof of the possibilities of which the people subjected to the Grace of Christ are capable. But among the peoples conquered by Christ are also other biblical peoples. The Jewish people are there as blind and mute witnesses of the Christian truth, they hate such civilization and fight against it in the shadow of their ghettos, but their terrible snares and treason crash against the strength of the full Christian life, of peoples who know that the enemies of Christ are not to be feared when they live with Christ. (See Julio Meinvielle. El Judío)

The pagans are also there as an immense and formless mass that must be conquered to the light of Christ little by little. Lastly, the Muslims, as belligerent enemies of this civilization, serve to maintain the animus of the Christian peoples ever ready, so that they do not relax, so that they can clearly appreciate how distant are the dominions of Him who said: "Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart" from those of the barbarians and the destructive fierceness of a people who has not subjected itself to the law of grace.

Medieval civilization is a holy civilization. It is, without any kind of doubt, the highest level reached or that will ever be reached as a civilization by humankind. A theologian of undisputed authority, as is the celebrated Cardinal Billot (De Ecclesia Christi, epilogue, volume II) applies to her what can be read in Apocalypse on the Church of Thiatira, word that means splendor and magnificence of triumph. "It is, thus, the Church of Thiatira, the fourth age, initiated by Charlemagne with the conformation of the Holy Roman Empire, the duration of which should be measured with the number one thousand (from year 800 to the year 1800). And certainly, the institution of the Holy Roman Empire sealed the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual city and was as a crown for all the social organization of the Kingdom of the Lord, of which Isaiah prophesied: 
Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee... And the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising. ...And the children of them that afflict thee, shall come bowing down to thee, and all that slandered thee shall worship the steps of thy feet...And thou shalt suck the milk of the Gentiles, and thou shalt be nursed with the breasts of kings: and thou shalt know that I am the Lord thy Savior, and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. (Chapter 60)
The other biblical peoples coexist together with the Christian people, but they feel dominated. The grace of Christ springs with such force in the heart of the peoples, that nothing can resist it or oppose it. Their efforts are in vain for, what can be done against the city when it is the Lord Himself who has custody of it? The forces of evil labor with determination, but their attempts are impotent. Saint Peter and Saint John teach us that the enemy of Christ has been working against Christ since then, and he does not triumph because he cannot. The Anti-Christ already brings about the iniquity.

(To be continued)